I continued studying the Koran, keeping it in my locker and reading it behind my desk in school. There was no way Mom or anyone from my family could find out.

“Are you Muslim, Felix?” a teacher asked me one day, seeing the Koran among my things.

“Not yet,” was my earnest response.

I was 14, but I was becoming increasingly convinced that Islam was the way, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I’d take the next step and convert, and soon I reached out to some Muslim kids at school.

“Your way is the truth. Do you know how I can become a true Muslim?”

“Yeah, man, but we don’t know anything about converting. You’ve got to talk to an imam.”

I went to the mosque in my school district and had a long talk with the imam. I answered his questions about what led me to him and why I believed in Islam. I had to profess my devotion to Islam in any number of circumstances.

“Will you remain faithful even if you fall on hard times, ill health, or whatnot?” he asked.

Yes, yes, yes, I said.

“You know,” he said to me finally, “Muslims aren’t viewed so favorably in the United States. Are you really sure you want to do this?”

“Yes,” I said again.

He spoke out three declarations of faith and I repeated after him, the last one regarding Yoshke being a prophet, not the son of, G-d. I said it. For all intents and purposes, I’d denounced Yoshke’s importance, but at least he still had a place here.

I started to join Muslim prayers in the mosque near school. Sometimes, in those early days, I’d think, What did I do? Did I sell my messiah? But then I got into it, studying Muslim books and keeping their festivals as best I could.

One day I was over at Mom’s place, and there was something on the news about kids dealing drugs at the school in my district.

Mom shook her head. I shook mine back at her. Not me.

I was preoccupied with the upcoming Muslim Eid, a holy festival. The Muslim kids had brought signed notes from their parents that they wouldn’t be attending school, but I couldn’t do that, so I forged a note from my mom excusing me from the first three periods of the day, went to the mosque, prayed, and joined in the service. When it was over, I went to school.

My phone buzzed with a text from Mom: Where are you?

At school, I typed.

Don’t you lie to me, she shot back.

I’d forgotten that if a student didn’t sign in at school in the morning, the system would send an automated message about his absence to the registered phone number, and when I denied disappearing, Mom panicked, thinking, Drugs.

When I came home, she grabbed my backpack, rifling through the contents.

Notebooks and pencils spilled out, along with a kufi, the Muslim head covering, the Koran, and some Muslim pamphlets.

“What?”

The look in Mom’s eyes told me she thought drugs would’ve been better than these; these made me a traitor. A heretic, or a madcap.

“I believe in Islam,” I said very quietly.

Mom went ballistic, railing at me, imploring me to stop this nonsense.

“They solicited you. They bought you off. You’re a minor, Felix, you can’t make a decision like that.”

For days, Mom didn’t back off. But neither did I.

Our differences cooled into a cold war, and then, over time, into a quasi-acceptance. We both abided by the same rule: Don’t ask, don’t tell.

I continued practicing Islam for years after that. I left school and started working. I was living on my own, but still very close to my family — my younger sister, my mom, my grandparents. My sister specifically was accepting of me. She was as Christian as the others, but she’d tell me, “I know religion has to be personal,” which meant a lot to me.

In Muslim circles, news from the Middle East would often be front-and-center conversation. My Muslim friends would discuss the goings-on, and some of them were extremely anti-Semitic. Me, I had years of “live and let live” with my family behind me; I’d benefited from their tolerance and tried to be open-minded in return. That attitude carried over and I never harbored hatred for the Jews. If anything, I pitied them. They’d always been at the mercy of others. I understood their need to be self-governing and have a safe place to live. If that place was Israel, it was fine with me.

I still lived in a neighborhood that just abutted chassidic Williamsburg, and some of the Muslims in the area would look at the neighboring Jews in an extremely negative light.

“The Jews are the root of everything bad in this world,” they ranted. “Every problem can be sourced back to them.”

“How can you say that?” I asked. “Do you have any proof?”

They didn’t. It was a hatred ingrained from their parents and theirs before them.

I certainly hadn’t inherited anything of the sort, and found their radicalism not just distasteful, but scary and irrational. Over time, I distanced myself from people like that.

It was a hard time for me, I tried to go to college, but it didn’t work out and I had to leave. I took on some odd jobs, and at some point, I began working as a custodian for a chassidic school in Williamsburg. I did my work quietly, like a silent shadow, but for one rabbi who made sure to find me every day.

“Hello,” he’d say, “Have yourself an amazing day, be blessed.”

Sometime later, after leaving that job, I hear a man yelling down the block.

“My friend, wait up, my friend!”

I turned around and saw a chassidic man coming toward me with his two small children.

There’s not a Jew in the world that’s a friend of mine, I thought, and I looked behind me to see who he was talking to. But we were the only people on that block.

When he got closer, I recognized him.

“Rabbi, how are you?” I said.

“Good, thank G-d. I don’t see you at the school anymore. Is everything okay?”

“Yes,” I assured him. “I’ve moved on.”

“Let me leave you with a blessing that G-d should guide you on the righteous path only to seek truth and be guided by Him.”

Oh!

“Thank you,” I said.

I never forgot him — or that encounter.

W

hen I was 24, I realized a dream of mine, and my grandfather’s. I signed up for the American Navy. Grandpa was overjoyed. Finally, he could live that wish through me. It was our joint hurrah. I’d call him and say, “Hey Papi, we’re at the Nellis Airforce base, you should see this place, it’s huge….”

“Go, go, Papito,” he said.

I spent four years in the Navy as an aircraft mechanic working alongside some truly wonderful people. Out at sea together on missions for many months, under often stressful conditions, we got to know each other like brothers. We were the boys, and I knew I’d give my life for any one of them.

My main work was on the huge aircraft carrier, USS Eisenhower, which was deployed to the Persian Gulf to fight ISIS in 2016-17. We were a fleet of which the Eisenhower was the flagship; the other ships were there to protect it.

The high-frequency radar of the aircraft on the ship interfered with the electricity in the vicinity, disrupting enemy communications, radar, and signals. The terrorist group, unable to use radio for communication, resorted to using runners to carry messages between their leaders’ hideouts, and we had to spot the runners and find their hiding places in order to eliminate the terrorists. While those people ostensibly subscribed to Islam, like I did, I never thought of them as fellow Muslims. They were worshipping evil, not G-d, and they had be defeated.

While I never got my boots on the ground in an actual war zone, working on a warship was still sobering. There’s no promise for a tomorrow, was the sense I had, an experience that would shape me.

One story stands out. When the aircraft carrier was crossing the Atlantic on its way back to the States, a storm broke out. Out of nowhere, a massive wave — 30 feet high — crashed into the side of the boat.

My friend was out on deck then, and the wave swept him out to sea. The others were sure we’d lost him. Even if we could find him, it was January, and the water was freezing. He’d die of hypothermia before anything else.

And then, the wave washed away — and there he was. My friend had smashed into the guardrail as he was being carried out to sea and held on for dear life. Against all odds, he’d survived.

I was in the sleeping area at the time, and when I heard the story afterward, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen a video. My friend told me death had missed him by a hairsbreadth, by fate and his trembling hands.

IN

my third year in the Navy, I learned that my beloved Grandpa Francisco had passed away. Away from my family, far away at sea, I mourned him alone.

That’s when the questions came. Grandpa was everything to me. I’d grown up in his home, and he’d influenced my life and aspirations. He was a good, good man. And yet, Muslims know that non-Muslims don’t go to paradise.

Where did that leave Grandpa? Was his soul now burning in the fires of purgatory?

In the naval barracks, those questions kept me up at night.

It couldn’t be. There had to be a different way. But while still in the Navy, there was little I could do to figure that out.

After I left the Navy, I returned to New York, to a world without my grandfather in it, still desperately trying to find a way around the Muslim de facto premise that he’d gone to purgatory. I tried some other Muslim denominations, trying to find another version of my story of the afterlife.

Regret tormented me. I should’ve converted Grandpa while I had the chance. Now he would burn forever. Is this on me? I’d wonder.

Would this be the fate of my family and friends, too? Superimposed against Grandpa’s death, my live-and-let-live attitude seemed stupid. Could it really be that I’d be the only one of my family in Heaven? I needed to convert them before they died.

All this was big. Beyond me. I wanted to put it all to bed. What if I could reconsider Christianity? Grandpa was a devout Christian until the end.

“If he’s wrong, we’ll be wrong together,” I told myself.

But I couldn’t do it. I’d realized long ago that Christianity wasn’t the right way. I had to be true to myself; I couldn’t go back there.

I turned to the Internet, typing in Islamic beliefs on the afterlife. None of the videos I watched satisfied me. Then, YouTube offered related content and directed me to a talk on the afterlife by a rabbi. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know what Judaism had to say, to add another voice to the mix, but I was lost, going in circles, and figured maybe it was worth listening.

I was dumbfounded when I realized what the rabbi was saying made more sense than anything I’d found up until then.

What?

I was 30 years old. I’d changed religions as a teen. I’d given this endless thought. Could there really be another way?

I

listened to more talks from more rabbis. Truth-seeker that I am, I had to. All my life, I realized, I’d learned about Judaism from Christians and Muslims. It was time to learn about Judaism from the Jews.

I listened to speeches by Rabbi Manis Friedman and Rabbi Lawrence Kelemen, and their voices and thoughts penetrated my consciousness. Rabbi Tovia Singer of Jerusalem became “my rabbi” — his absolute authenticity resonated strongly.

In one lecture, Rabbi Singer spoke about the weight of preconceived notions.

“If you look at a white sheet of paper with red glasses, you’ll see a red paper no matter how hard you look,” he said.

Yes, yes, I almost cried. This was what I was thinking. I didn’t want the preconceived notions of the Christians or the Muslims. But this man was inviting me not even to see things from a Jewish perspective, to just see clean.

This was someone I could hear from.

He continued with a source, Devarim 18:15–18, where G-d tells Moses that he’s going to appoint a new prophet. Christianity and Islam insert their messiah and prophet respectively, but he showed that if you look at the verse and continue reading, it’s Joshua who was the next prophet after Moses.

The Muslims teach that the Torah was once true but had been corrupted with the years. I took off those glasses, and started to look with my own eyes. I studied Jewish history, the different places the Jews were exiled to. I learned that two thousand years ago, after the destruction of the Second Temple, some Jews had gone east and others west. For thousands of years there were Jews in Arab lands and Jews in Europe, and never had the twain met. And yet, with the creation of the State of Israel and the ingathering of thousands of Jews from many different places, it became clear that they all kept the same Torah, prayed the same prayers, with perhaps some minor discrepancies in pronunciation. Their Torah was utterly uncorrupted, I learned. Thousands of years after it was given, Jews from disparate places could pray in one another’s synagogues and read the very same text.

I was confounded, and frankly, tired. I didn’t know if I had it in me to truly register what this meant.

I called my sister.

“I think I’m starting to believe that the Torah is the true word of G-d.”

She didn’t point out how crazy or bizarre I was, that I’d already decided something else long ago, and what now? Instead, she gave me her wholehearted support and tried to find Jewish people on social media for me to talk to. She was with me in this.

One Friday, I called her again. I was scared and unsure, torn about whether I should go to prayers.

“Only you can decide,” she said.

“I know…. You know what, I’m going today just to figure it out. To ask for G-d’s help, however this goes.”

It turned out that I didn’t even get into the mosque to talk to G-d. I stood outside, hearing the muezzin calling everyone to come pray, and a thought buzzed, bee-like, into my mind. Felix, if you don’t at least try to be Jewish, you’ll regret it forever. Regret it forever. Forever. For….

It was insistent, urgent, echoing through me. I turned and left.

In my heart, from that day I was a Muslim no longer. But did that mean I had to be a Jew, with the hundreds of commandments that entailed? It was too big a jump. And the Jews had a moral framework for non-Jews — the Noahide laws. I could observe those and identify as a Noahide.

For a short while I was at peace. But it didn’t last. I was coming from praying five times a day, working on a connection with G-d. A Noahide didn’t have a formal system for a connection, and I needed that. I couldn’t handle the disconnect from G-d.

It was time to venture further than cyberspace. Time to find real Jews and see if — how — I could do this.

BY

now I was living in upstate New York, where my family had had moved as well, and I started to look up synagogues in the area, eventually discovering Rabbi Z. (In Islamic law, converting someone out is a crime punishable by death — so for safety, I’ll refer to the rabbis who were actively involved in my conversion by their initials.)

I went to meet him at his synagogue.

“Hi, I’m Felix. I self-identify as a Noahide. I used to be a Muslim, and before that I was a Christian. Now, I want to be Jewish.”

Bombshell of an introduction — it should’ve gotten me kicked out of the sanctuary. Instead, the good rabbi brought me inside, and we spoke as he showed me around the place.

“Why can’t you just live a good, moral life as a gentile?” he asked me.

I started my story, and he heard me out for two hours until I was done. Eventually, he realized I wasn’t some nut who wanted to change religious identities like coats from G-d’s closet; this was a journey of my soul.

“I think you should come on Shabbat and see the people and the services for yourself to see if this is something you want to do,” he finally told me.

I came, sat in the back, and tried to follow the service in a translated siddur. I knew no Hebrew and was only following because the gabbai would call out the page numbers. But I read the prayers in English and they were like nothing I’d ever prayed before. Lecha Dodi left me awestruck; the excitement and love for the Sabbath, the analogy to a bride, it was all alive, a beloved, real thing.

I felt like I was peeking in on a world of beautiful depth and wisdom. In my mind, the Jews had always been an exclusive group. Unlike the Christians and the Muslims, they didn’t believe in proselytizing and getting everyone in to do what they were doing. The stereotype painted them as aloof, wary, and disinterested in others, holding the world at arm’s length. This was corroborated by the Jews I’d met in Williamsburg who seemed to live on their own island within the sea of urban New York.

But this was my first time on the “inside,” and the people drew me close, blowing my preconceived notions into the water. They welcomed me into the shul and community, patiently explaining what they were doing. If they had a “club,” its membership wasn’t closed.

There were two couples, one younger and one older, who literally opened their doors to me. I moved into the area and these two homes were my go-to for Shabbos, for any questions I had, for any help I needed. I saw Jewish life at play at two diverse stages, and I knew I wanted this.

I lived close to the shul upstate for over a year, and then a work-related opportunity came up. It would entail moving to New York City.

“How can I leave now?” I asked Rabbi Z.

“NYC is the best place to convert to Judaism outside of Israel,” he said.

I

found an apartment in Midwood, Brooklyn, started working, and set out to look for a shul that would sponsor my conversion. I didn’t realize that mostly Syrian Sephardic synagogues in the Midwood area didn’t do conversions. No one would give me the time of day. My rabbi had said NYC was the place, only he hadn’t meant Midwood.

I called 19 shuls, persistent as a woodpecker. Only three responded. Two said “not us” — and one acquiesced. That was all I needed.

Rabbi E., the shul’s rabbi, contacted Rabbi Z. upstate. Once he confirmed my story, he was welcoming and supportive.

“Let me introduce you to a recent convert,” he said. “And you should get to know everyone really, the whole congregation.”

He called the director of the Rabbinical Council of America who oversees halachic conversions. I started their classes and got in touch with the beis din in Manhattan. From the time I signed my contract with the beis din until my actual conversion, it took about a year.

I know that’s relatively short and smooth — there were people in my geirus classes who were on their second or third year — and I attribute it to the wonderful people who eased the way for me. The people of the first synagogue in upstate New York who’d taken me in wholeheartedly; Rabbi E., my sponsoring rabbi, who constantly checked in, and a rabbi I got to know in my sponsoring shul. Rabbi E. introduced me to him one of the first times I came to the shul.

“Go sit next to Rabbi S., he’ll take care of you, he’s a great guy and rabbi himself.”

After davening that day, we got talking a little.

“My son’s getting married in a few days, I’d love if you could come to the wedding,” Rabbi S. said.

“But you barely know me,” I protested.

“Just come,” he insisted. “You should see a Jewish wedding. Get to know us, this will be the first of many Jewish weddings — your own among them, soon.”

None of this sort of generosity of spirit, strangers coming to a wedding reception, is normal in the wider world. They’re the wary ones, I realized. The frum Jews would have anyone and everyone at their simchahs, dancing, eating, being leibedig, even me — a six-and-a-half-footer, with a physique that makes people cross the street.

Rabbi S. was one of many people who made sure I had a place to go on Shabbos and Yom Tov. The BJX synagogue was another haven for me at the time, with the rabbis and congregants there showing me much care and guidance.

Still, as much as other people eased the way, the journey was internal, carried by a will from deep inside. No one can convert you, except yourself. When the congregation would say “asher kidishanu bemitzvosav,” I’d feel like an imposter. I hadn’t been sanctified — yet — and these weren’t my commandments. They didn’t mean me at all. It was excruciating, being other, being in that limbo place. It takes intense conviction to stay the course and pull through to the other side.

After a year, I completed my classes, having covered all topics of kosher laws, Shabbos and festival laws, and myriad other halachos. In the summer I took a basic Hebrew reading course.

By Rosh Hashanah, I was a kosher ger. I had acquired a Jewish neshamah, a neshamah that had been at Sinai and had heard the commandments: It was all mine now. Felix had become Ephraim Nachman ben Avraham Avinu, and the same rabbis that wouldn’t convert me two years prior now wanted me for a minyan. I went to all sorts of shuls and heard the Torah being read in different styles — but it was all the same Torah, the Torah that hadn’t changed in thousands of years, the truth I finally knew.

I was a Jewish man now, and I set my sights on having a Jewish family, bearing in mind the brachah Rabbi S. gave me when he invited me to his son’s wedding, about soon celebrating my own.

When I first got into the frum dating scene, I contacted several shadchanim, but the process wasn’t working for me. I got on a dating app and paid for a six-month subscription, during which time I went on two unsuccessful dates. I’d resigned myself to going back to shadchanim, when, just a week before my membership expired, my wife and I connected through the app.

At first, I wasn’t sure if it was an accidental connection on her part — she was a single mom, part of a large frum family in an out-of-town community. We started to chat on the app and I cautioned myself, “Hope for the best, expect the worst.”

But there was something here, a burgeoning relationship, and we moved off the app to WhatsApp and then to daily calls. She wanted a good man who would help build a good life for her daughter and for the family she prayed she’d have. That I was a ger, that I used to be a Muslim and a Christian? All she cared about was that I had a kosher conversion, that I was now a card-carrying member of the tribe. Our relationship took off.

At some point, I flew out to her, and I also met her large family, her many friends. I’d learn that a Jewish family is not just a home and lawn on a street, but a part of a much larger whole.

“No one warned me that I’d meet two-thirds of the community,” I told her at our engagement.

My wife, a teacher in the local girls’ school for years, is a beloved member of the community — and people hugged me as if they knew me, too.

“You wife taught my daughter.” “I knew your wife when she was a kid, we used to play on the block together.”

Rabbi E., my sponsoring rabbi, officiated at my wedding, traveling all the way with his family to be here for me. Rabbi S., whom I’d grown so close to, came, too. He and his wife walked me and my parents down the aisle to the chuppah.

Today I live with my wife and the daughter we’re raising together in our Jewish home, in the heart of the community. My wife gave me an “in” from the get-go. It’s a year after our wedding, and I’ll still come across someone in town who says, “Oh, I’ve been wanting to meet you.”

I’ll say, “Who are you?”

And then we’ll laugh.

In this town I found kindness, a stream of Shabbos invites that’s still flowing, a community that defies any stereotypes I’d had about Jewish communities.

I also found a small chassidish shul. I feel connected to Rebbe Nachman’s teachings, and the depth and penimiyus of chassidus, and while I don’t have a rebbe, I follow the mehalech, have a chassidish rav, and the shul I daven in has just about enough shtreimel-clad members to make a minyan, myself included. On Shabbos, I look like those guys I’d see on Marcy Avenue as a child. The joke’s on me.

I haven’t been back to Brooklyn in a while, but I would like to go back to Williamsburg one day to find the rabbi who noticed me and gave me that beautiful brachah. I want to tell him that I believe it was the beginning of the blessings that would guide me to the truth of Hashem.

Sometimes, I think back and regret that it took me this long, that my quest for truth took such a circuitous route — but everything happens at the right time, and this is the journey Hashem led me on. It had to happen in this sequence.

Rabbis ask me to talk about my story in shul and at events. I have good oratory skills but that’s not why I get up and speak. It’s because of the message I want to impart to other frum Jews: I’ve seen it all and yet I’ve come here. If you have this, you were born into this, know: It’s the place to be, the only real place of connection to G-d.

Another joke, one people ask me is, “Ephraim, what’s gonna happen in another fifteen years?”

“You know I always believed in G-d,” I counter. “I never had any problem with G-d, I had an issue with the prophets and books. But I’m good now.”

Here’s how I see myself: Thirty-three years old as a man, two years old as a Jew. I’m a new person, a Jew, and I always will be. In 15 years, and in another 15 — until I meet my Maker.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1063)